Well, after finally having a day to sit down and try out most lot of the things I've been thinking about, I've found that:
- Everything works perfectly across all of my software as long as I populate the Album Artist field. If left blank, only one of my devices recognises the tracks as belonging to a whole album and displays them as such. Otherwise, all of the tracks are displayed individually.
- Setting the naming string with the command "[IFMULTI]\Disc [disc]" doesn't group multi-disc CDs as one album in the default settings on all my software. However, there is an option in UAPP to ignore the file path and group tracks from different folders which have the same album name and artist ID, which solves this problem. Again, the Album Artist field needs to be populated for this function to work.
Note: Having the option to either play each CD individually or as a complete set may be something I actually want to keep, so I'm glad I found it. - Using the command "[IFMULTI][disc].[]" obviously groups multi-disc CDs as one album without having to alter any of the settings.
- None of my software appears to support sort tags! In fact, each device library lists the artists differently. As software I use in the future may be able to read these tags, I'll probably still include them just to be on the safe side.
So I'm a few steps closer to having things set the way I want them!
I would just like to ask, how do those of you with very large music collections arrange your digital music library when saving files? I know this is based purely on personal preference, but at the moment I have the following:
Music > (followed by three folders) MP3/Lossless/HDtracks > Album Artist > Album
This is largely just because I already have a collection of mp3 files, The HDtracks folder was created when I downloaded some sampler albums, and Lossless seemed suitable for ripping CDs to FLAC. This has worked fine up until now, but I'm thinking about creating an alphabetical folder hierarchy to tidy things up a bit (the mp3 files will still have their own folder).
On a similar point, is it a simple process to have files saved as both FLAC and mp3 at the same time? It might be worth replacing those old mp3 files with new, accurately ripped ones.